Bash tip of the day: lazygit

Last week I asked which bash aliases you like to use and got a ton of great responses. One that had almost universal benefit was lazygit, from Mishal:

function lazygit() {
   local message="$1"
   local push_branch="${2:-$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)}"
   echo "Commit Message: $message"
   echo "Push Branch: ${push_branch}"
   git add --all
   git commit -m "$message"
   git push origin "$push_branch"
}

I added it to bash as soon as I saw it, try it yourself!

If you have improvements or other aliases/functions for bash that you love, comment below!

Comments

[David]

It's best to practice non-lazy Git and be explicit when you actually want to add everything. Hygienic commit messages allow you and other developers to really glean information about a series if commits.

If it's just work-in-progress, then commit as such with a WIP commit and then come back to and squash into logical commits

[Nočnica Mellifera]

I think I should have clarified that you shouldn’t use lazygit on anything but your own demo projects. Hopefully the name makes it obvious :)

I should write something about git best practices!

[David]

That's fair -- although, I practice this in my personal projects as well as I always like a clean history, but everything for humans is habitual. Defaulting to thinking and atomic commits carries over into daily work IMO :)

But I'm a bit extreme, too, as I'm almost alias-less. I always type the verbose git command

[Zen]

If me:

git status
git add -A .
git commit -m "Upload"
git push

[Vlastimil Pospichal]

Why . at the end of git add?

[Zen]

For select all files.

[Vlastimil Pospichal]

Usually I don't want to select all files, especially if I want to split commit into more independent steps.

[Jimmy McBride]

I've created some bash scripts similar to Zen's as well:

Filename: gitit

git add .
git commit -m "$1"
git push

Example: gitit "init commit"

I also have one for creating new branches and pushing their upstream:

Filename: branch

git checkout -b "$1"
git push origin -u "$1"

I always use branch to make new branches that way when I use gitit to push up so it works without fail. I have a few more, but those are my most used bash scripts I use in my git flow

[Vlastimil Pospichal]

I am not lazy. First I run git status to see what has been modified, and/or git diff. Then git add what I want to have as part of the commit (usually git add -A, but sometime a cherry-pick is needed). Only then will I perform a git commit and a git push.

Working with Git requires some care. I use aliases, of course.

[spiritupbro]

i thought at first you talk about open source program called lazygit

jesseduffield / lazygit

simple terminal UI for git commands

^{Special thanks to:}

Warp is a modern, Rust-based terminal with AI built in so you and your team can build great software, faster.

^{Visit warp.dev to learn more.}

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I (Jesse) co-founded Zenbu to save your company time and money by helping you manage its SaaS subscriptions. Check it out!

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A simple terminal UI for git commands

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Elevator Pitch

Rant time: You've heard it before, git is powerful, but what good is that power when everything is so damn hard to do? Interactive rebasing requires you to edit a goddamn TODO file in your editor? Are you kidding me? To stage part of a file you need to use a command line program to step…

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[Patryk Gronkiewicz]

alias lazygit=lazygit that's totally unnecessary

[Jimmy McBride]

That's actually pretty cool! I'm going to apopt that.

[Lucas G. Terracino]

I've been creating scripts lately to ease my development, and amazingly I've never thought about this, is dead simple and useful.

[Bhupesh Varshney 👾]

Do you mind explaining what's the usecase for this ?

[Nočnica Mellifera]

If you’re working on a solo project and just want to use git as a backup system, this lets you enter a single command to send all current changes up to your repository.

[Nočnica Mellifera]

Love this. Do you mind if I share it in next week’s bash tip? I’ll of course link to your great article